So Fat, You Can Taste It

Australian scientists claim they’ve stumbled upon new flavor sense: fat.Everyone knows that fat is an excellent vehicle for food flavors and has a highly appealing mouthfeel. A new study, however, suggests that along with sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (essentially, the ability to detect protein), we can also actually taste fat itself.

Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, “This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.” In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree.

The most common form of cocoa butter has a melting point of around 34 to 38 degrees Celsius (93 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit), rendering chocolate a solid at room temperature that readily melts once inside the mouth. Cocoa butter is one of the most stable fats known, containing natural antioxidants.